How the Late James Shigeta Changed the Image of Asian American Men

One of the tough things about getting to a certain age, and I won’t say what age, is that you start to lose your heroes.

That’s what happened this week with the passing of James Shigeta, the Japanese American actor who carved out an iconic legacy that began in the late 1940s and stretched until he was well into his seventies. His eulogies have primarily identified him via his brief but memorable turn as the doomed CEO of the Nakatomi Corporation, whose stoic resistance to terrorists in the original “Die Hard” leads to his summary execution.

Most Asian Americans think of him differently. We remember him first not for dying, but for living — and loving. Because Shigeta, despite launching his career when the scars of World War II’s bloody conflict with Japan were still raw and fresh, managed to emerge as a romantic leading man, one of the very few Asian Americans to occupy that role in Hollywood history.

It was always something Shigeta himself downplayed, pointing out that he’d been hired by Columbia as one of its house stable of contract performers and as a young stock player, found himself being put into projects as a romantic hero almost accidentally, because, as he put it, he was “the guy the studio had available.”

Shigeta’s humility undersells his incredible screen presence — suave, sizzling, magnetic — and the ground he broke in the depiction of Asians on the silver screen.

In his very first cinematic turn, in Sam Fuller’s acclaimed 1959 cult noir “The Crimson Kimono,” he played Detective Joe Kojaku, a tough Japanese American cop who ends up in an interracial love triangle with his partner and the key witness to a murder case — and gets the girl in the end. The final shot of the movie is an extended kiss between Kojaku and the ingenue, the first ever filmed between an Asian man and a white woman in American movies.

A few years later, Shigeta would show another side of his romantic prowess in 1961’s film adaptation of the lighthearted Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Flower Drum Song,” in which he stars as Wang Ta, the American-born son of a wealthy Chinatown family torn between sexy Chinese American showgirl Linda Low (Nancy Kwan) and Mei Li (Mi yoshi Umeki), the innocent newly immigrated girl to whom he’s been promised in an arranged marriage

The image of the Asian American male seen in these two films was like nothing seen in Hollywood before, and rarely seen since — the first to give an Asian American actor the opportunity to play complicated, sympathetic humans, rather than thinly drawn slapstick cartoons. Shigeta took full advantage of his leading-man license, bringing to life characters who were in turn raw, passionate, flirtatious, debonair, bumbling, baffled, strong and tender.

And then — almost as soon as it began, it was over. “Flower Drum Song” would be Shigeta’s last chance to demonstrate his swoonworthy chops. While he continued to flash his acting talents over a long and illustrious career in film and television, he would never again be cast as a romantic protagonist.

And neither would any other Asian American male.

Over the course of the next 53 years, the number of Asian American men accorded romantic leading-man status in Hollywood was the same as the number of Asian American men to land on the moon. Some scored action leads and others, rare parts as comic and dramatic protagonists. But studios seeking men who could meet cute, court sweet and sweep girls off their feet sought them elsewhere.

Until this fall, that is. The ABC series “Selfie,” a modern reboot of the George Bernard Shaw “Pygmalion,” will star John Cho, arguably the most successful Asian American actor of his generation, in a rom-com pairing with British actress Karen Gillan. Even from the show’s pilot, it seems clear that the initial animosity between Cho and his extreme-makeover subject will lead to attraction (and inevitably, entanglement). Cho calls the casting “revolutionary.”

“It’s certainly a personal revolution for me,” he told the Toronto Star, noting that he never gets offered heartthrob roles. “Asians narratively in shows are insignificant. They’re the cop, or the waitress, or whatever it is. You see them in the background. So to be in this position is a bit of a landmark.”

A landmark that had its foundation laid a half-century ago, by the man who left us this week.

“James Shigeta was a hero to Asian Americans and Japanese Americans like myself, because he was proof that we could be leading men too,” says Koji Sakai, screenwriter of 2009’s indie Asian American feature “The People I’ve Slept With,” in which Shigeta’s played the father of a young, pregnant Asian American woman (Karin Anna Cheung) trying to figure out the identity of her baby’s father. “It was an honor to work with him — I remember telling the interns on the movie that they needed to talk to him and listen to his stories, because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Quentin Lee, who directed “The People I’ve Slept With,” concurs. “I knew James from seeing ‘Flower Drum Song,’ and I was spellbound by his charisma,” says Lee. “I was lucky enough to capture James in his last feature as a fun loving and wise Asian American dad, breaking the stereotype of the stern and first generation Asian American dads in popular media.”

But when lauded for his groundbreaking, stereotype-smashing career, Shigeta always brushed away the accolades. “It’s just acting,” he told me the one time I met him, at a screening of Jeff Adachi’s documentary about Asian male images in Hollywood, “The Slanted Screen.” “It’s nice to be seen as some kind of hero, but that’s not who I really am.”

But for those of us who grew up, uncertain and awkward, the symbol he represented changed how we thought of ourselves, and maybe, just a little bit, what others thought of us. Because if “Selfie” is a success this fall, it will be in no small part because half a century ago, Joe Kojaku and Wang Ta paved the way.

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